THE Pennine Acute Trust is to sell its Westhulme, Oldham, headquarters in an attempt to cut running costs and reduce the number of job losses needed to cover a cash crisis.

The troubled trust - which runs the Royal Oldham, Rochdale Infirmary, Fairfield and North Manchester hospitals - is facing an overspend of £21.3million in 2006/07 and a recurring deficit of £28.3million.

Though no price has been put on the Westhulme site, for reasons of "commercial confidentiality", the sale will generate savings and raise significant capital.

Around 280 administration and support staff currently housed at Westhulme - behind the main hospital building - will be transferred to other sites, including offices at North Manchester General.

The news comes months after the trust announced that it could be axeing up to 800 jobs in an attempt to balance the books.

Trust officials now say the job losses will be significantly lower than feared thanks to more than 400 cash-saving schemes.

Around 325 posts across the four hospitals are now expected to be affected, though it is claimed the vast majority of threatened staff will be redeployed.

Other money-saving methods identified include the reduction in bed numbers by around 10 per cent - around 250 out of 2,500. The trust says this will not impact on patient services as it is in line with the prediction of increased efficiency in services and national forecasts for moving more NHS care in to the community.

A spokesman denied the debt was a result of the trust being badly run, but blamed a number of factors, including the wider NHS "funding framework".

Bob Chadwick, acting chief executive, said: "We promised that we would leave no stone unturned to minimise the impact of our plan on posts, and that is what we have done.

"The Westhulme site has given long and proud service which pre-dates the creation of the NHS, but we cannot justify retaining it at a cost to our recovery programme.

"We are very pleased that so many ideas have been generated, which have substantially reduced our estimate of how many posts will be affected. We have seen a lot of speculation about the impact of our recovery plan, and some high figures have been quoted by some commentators, who have talked about 'job losses'.

"But we have always said, and have repeated to staff, that we are talking posts, not jobs, and that, with a turnover of 11 per cent we are increasingly confident that the vast majority of staff affected will be offered redeployment.

"We cannot give any guarantees today, but I hope that our actions in relation to our headquarters show that as promised we will do everything we can to avoid redundancies. We anticipate that there would be less than 100 and we will do everything possible to minimise that number.

"We realise that this is a difficult time for all staff, but we must build a firm financial foundation for the future development of our services."